


Bring Back

by disenchanted



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Class Issues, Closeted Character, Dunkirk (2017) characters not knowing anything about tides, Established Relationship, Family Issues, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-War, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 19:11:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14775542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Farrier takes Collins home for the first time.





	Bring Back

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [hightide2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/hightide2018) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Collins introduces Farrier to his family (or vice versa) after the war ends. I'm open to whether his family figures out the true nature of their relationship, and if his parents react positively or negatively to it.

Farrier regretted asking Collins to stay as soon as he had posted the letter. It would be a waste of Collins’ leave; there was nothing to do at the house in Norfolk but walk or ride, and Farrier had his bad leg and the weather would be rotten. With only Collins, Farrier, and Farrier’s mother, there would not even be enough to make up a four for bridge. But the letter was posted, and Collins accepted the invitation, albeit not without some hesitancy of his own: I don’t know, he wrote, that I’m any more the right sort than I have ever been, but if you and your people are prepared to tolerate unfashionable company, I haven’t got anything better to do.

In a postscript Collins had added: Have been missing you often. ‘Missing you’, in their private lovers’ parlance, meant ‘wanking to keep from missing you’, which Collins apparently did thoroughly and almost ceaselessly. When they were together in London, in the townhouse that Mrs Farrier had left vacant when the war began, they fucked like animals, and Collins would tell Farrier everything he had imagined since they last met: ‘Fucking you till you’re sore, sucking your cock, licking your arse, tasting you, fucking your mouth, I want you every second I’m conscious, and when I’m dreaming too, I’ve got to be dead drunk to keep from wanting you—’

Farrier met Collins off the train at the station in Wolferton. In his holey green jumper and wrinkled trousers Collins looked like a shabby schoolmaster. In fact he was Squadron Leader Archibald Collins, DSO, DFC, who only a few months ago left RAF Ein Shemer, Palestine, for Duxford; Farrier had had to convince him not to request to be posted to Butterworth in Malaya. This was hinted at only by his kitbag, stamped with ‘RAF’ and his serial number, which he was refusing to allow Farrier to take. Their hands brushed as they tussled over the bag, and they looked at each other, desiring each other, in the confused way they had come to do in the years since the war had ended.

They were not inches from death any longer. They stood at thirty, perhaps forty years’ distance from it. That was what they had fought for: that, and Britain. Now they had life, and Britain, ragged and tired though they both were. Now they had time. But like a proud working man who has come into sudden riches they were embarrassed and bewildered by their fortune.

‘I’ve brought the car,’ said Farrier. ‘I’ve been saving up petrol. Would you like to drive, or shall I?’

The car was the Avon Coupe that Farrier had bought for himself some years before the war. His mother had chastised him for buying it: they already had an enormous old Daimler and a smaller, uglier Vauxhall Ten. Before petrol began to be rationed he drove it back and forth between Norfolk and London, navigating between the two very different men he was then. In Norfolk he rode to hunt, talked familiarly with the tenants on his father’s land, woke before dawn to exercise the hounds and horses; in London he stayed out till dawn, and brought boys—not rough, not gentlemen—back with him. Now he only went to London with Collins, for Collins. He did not want the noise any longer, the crowds, the men who had lost an eye or an arm in this war or the last and sold matches or shoestrings at street corners. He liked to open his window at nights and hear frogs and owls. But there was Collins, who had never been to Wolferton, and would not live there if Farrier pleaded.

At the wheel of the coupe, with his gaze cast ahead, Collins was handsome. His overlong hair fell over his forehead, the corner of his mouth twitched as if he were thinking of something funny. When he returned from Palestine he had been sunburnt, as it seemed he had been perpetually, there; by now the natural milkiness of his skin had reasserted itself. Have I chosen him? Farrier asked himself. Yes, he answered, I suppose I have.

‘Turn left here,’ said Farrier. ‘In about five hundred feet turn right.’

They were on Farrier’s land now—that was to say, the land Farrier had inherited when his father died. Collins did not know this, and glanced nervously at the wooden gate that blocked them from going on down the unpaved road. All around them were wheat fields, bare and brown; the harvest had passed.

‘Is this it?’ asked Collins. ‘Are you going to get out and open that, or have I got to do it myself?’

‘Oh no,’ said Farrier, ‘this is only one of my tenant’s farms. No, I brought you here because I happen to know he’s away at the moment, he’s visiting his wife’s family in Lincolnshire.’

Farrier got out and opened the gate, then returned to the car and directed Collins to park behind a row of trees that shielded them from view of the road. Once Collins took Farrier’s meaning he became hazy-eyed, covetous, distracted from himself by his own lust. They fumbled, mouthed at each other’s necks and cheeks, seeking kisses but, in the hurry to unbutton shirts and trousers, never quite hitting the mark.

Collins said, ‘I’ve missed you—’

‘I know,’ said Farrier.

‘I’ve wanted you—’

‘I know.’

Collins climbed into Farrier’s lap. He had to hunch down, bend his head forward to keep from knocking it against the ceiling of the car. His trousers were shoved down his thighs, the front of his shirt half-obscured his hard cock. His breath dampened the air between their mouths; Farrier tilted his head up for a kiss.

‘I wish we’d met in London,’ said Collins. ‘I’d no let ye out of bed.’

They made a go of it there in the coupe anyway, with their knees and elbows knocking into things, muscles cramping as they contorted themselves towards pleasure. Farrier spat on his fingers and worked them into Collins’ arse. Collins wriggled and groaned, tugging at himself, no doubt thinking of the feather bed in Farrier’s bedroom in the townhouse. He told Farrier what he had imagined since they last met, and kept it up till Farrier finished, some time after himself. Then he slumped down into the seat next to Farrier and lighted them both cigarettes.

 

* * *

 

Tea was laid out for them when they arrived: sandwiches with cucumber and watercress from the kitchen garden, turnovers with cherries from the orchards, chocolate cake of the ersatz sort that rationing had brought into being. The tea itself was Chinese, sweeter and more delicate than the char Collins made for himself. Presiding over it all was Farrier’s mother.

Taller than Farrier by an inch or two, and much slimmer, she was extraordinarily similar in the face: she had his full lips and rounded chin, the same worried slope of the eyelids. Farrier had always had the sense that she lamented the resemblance; when he was much younger, and an aunt or a cousin commented on their likeness, she sighed and looked him up and down as if he were an unwanted heirloom which she had got to go through the trouble of selling. She was clean and proper, sensible in the way that only a woman of her means could afford to be: she wore a plain cotton dress and worn shoes, which she was confident in doing only because everybody knew that that was not all she had to wear.

When she greeted Collins, he shook her hand vigorously and said, ‘Weel, you’re better-looking than you were in the photo Farrier showed me. —Not to say you looked bad in that one, I mean!’

Farrier felt as if his organs were withering. He prepared himself for the retort, the wrinkled nose and cruelly surveying gaze, and found instead that she laughed: with guarded shock, a touch of disbelief that this man was here, saying these things to her, but with amusement, too.

She said, ‘I’m not an emperor, or an actress; you needn’t feel as if you have got to flatter me. Sit down, won’t you, and I’ll pour out.’

Farrier thought this might have been a generous expression of goodwill, a decision to move on without letting Collins know that he had overstepped—though he had not, in his years of being her son, seen her to be especially forgiving. But they went on like that. She asked him whether the journey had been all right, and he said, ‘Not as bad as it could have been. But trains are a naturally inferior mode of transportation, you see. I thought about flying a Spit up here, but I’d browned enough farmers off landing in their fields during the war.’ She gave a sharp ‘Ha!’ and Collins’ cheeks began to go pink, round and shiny like slightly unripe peaches.

Tea turned into cocktails; Collins offered to make them martinis, and handed one to Mrs Farrier with an unignorable wink. He had that manner with women, young and old; he was so profoundly uninterested in them sexually that he became, with the knowledge that he would never have to follow through, quite bold. Mrs Farrier seemed to intuit something of this; she was warm to Collins, unconcerned. To men who thought they might become her next husband, she could not be colder.

The drunker Collins got, the more he talked about the war. Between him and Farrier, it was rarely mentioned; they had had too many rows about it. Farrier and his mother had not spoken of it at all after it ended: while he was in the stalags she wrote to him about the garden, the staff, the dogs and the horses, and when he was repatriated, she treated him as if he had simply been away for a week-end, in town or with a friend. Yet she seemed not only to tolerate Collins’ war stories but to be pleased by them.

Of course they were funny stories, the ones Collins told to old men who struck up conversations in pubs. Collins had a way of telling them that made it sound as if the war were a lark, a wild holiday: perhaps that was how it felt to him, in retrospect.

‘—Missed the balloons by,’ he was saying, ‘it must have been a matter of feet, I barely cleared them—and then I let them all back at Control know just what incompetent fools they were, vectoring me straight into a formation of observation balloons—I might have used the word incompetent, but I used a lot of stronger words, too, if you know what I mean. Which would have been dandy if the Station Commander hadn’t been at Control, listening in, right at that moment—and then I was the one who got the bollocking! Ehm, excuse my language…’

Farrier could not tell stories the way Collins could. He had them—it was surprising, the mad things one could get up to in a German prison camp—but he knew from experience that to tell them merely evoked pity. He had not had a good war: he had been captured, and he had not escaped. There was no honour in it, nothing to be envied or admired.

‘Stop talking so much shop,’ he told Collins.

Mrs Farrier said, ‘I don’t mind. Well, I don’t mind being amused’—she addressed this to Collins—‘so long as you don’t start talking about numbers; I do hate a numbers bore. Cars, aeroplanes, boats, it’s all the same. Such-and-such inches from prow to tail, takes such-and-such gallons of fuel…’

‘Sounds like Lewis,’ said Collins, laughing.

‘Does it?’ she asked.

 

* * *

 

That house, in which Farrier had been born and raised—the house to which he returned during holidays at school, and after he was demobbed—had never looked more different than when he looked at it thinking of Collins. When he was young he feared that, in comparison to his schoolmates’ castles and abbeys, it wasn’t grand enough: it was only eighteenth-century, a box of red brick with stone quoins and six stout chimneys. The interior had last been done in the 1880s, and had that characteristic Victorian gloom, with too much furniture and dark, thickly-patterned wallpaper. In the last months of the war, after Farrier had returned, he had been ashamed that he owned such a house, and the one in London, when so many families had been bombed out of their homes—or, if they were very unlucky, _in_ their homes. Perhaps if he had done things differently, if he had saved his fuel and turned back that day at Dunkirk, he might have protected—

Now he wasn’t certain what to think of the place, if only because he’d no idea what Collins thought. Was it ridiculous in its luxury, or not quite as splendid as Collins had expected? Collins was constantly looking about, studying a picture or peeking down a corridor, but his look was utterly benign. And then they were having dinner, and he had the bright, blurry, unreadable expression that Farrier knew meant he was properly drunk. Farrier went on refilling his own glass, trying to catch up. If they had been in London, he thought grimly, they would be in the billiards room, drinking cognac and listening to records before wandering up to bed.

‘—Not far at all to The Wash,’ Mrs Farrier was telling Collins, ‘a very short drive, or—do you ride, Squadron Leader?’

‘Did as a boy,’ said Collins. ‘Less often these days, now I’ve got flying to bother about.’

‘If you’d like,’ she said, ‘you can borrow Lavender. She was Robert’s horse, a lovely roan Arabian; I’m afraid she sees rather less of the world than she’d like, these days. … Lewis has told you about Robert?’

‘Oh—yes!’ said Collins, startled; he must have come close to forgetting. His condolences—‘Yes, he told me. I was sorry to hear of it’—carried a weight that suggested he understood how little consolation he could offer.

Robert Farrier was younger than his brother by three years; he had been twenty-five when the war began, twenty-six when he joined up. He was an officer in the Royal Artillery, and died in Arnhem, shot in the throat, during Operation Market Garden. Farrier remembered that when he received his mother’s letter with the news, he was, in his grief, stunningly envious that Robert had had a chance to die with honour.

‘But yes,’ said Collins, ‘I’d love to see The Wash.’

With that the subject was closed. Mrs Farrier’s expression, throughout the exchange, had not altered. She was composed, serene, almost unblinking, lifting her glass to her lips, patting her lips with her napkin, taking up knife and fork and slicing off another piece of cutlet. Farrier had never seen her weep, or her chin so much as tremble. He wondered whether she had ever wept, for his father or his brother or for himself. When he was stood on Dunkirk beach, watching his Spit blacken and fall apart, there were tears in his eyes, and he was ashamed: that was not how his people were.

 

* * *

 

After dinner they retreated to the smoking room, and went on drinking past midnight. There was a piano there, a Steinway grand from about 1870, upon which Collins played (and sang, decently) the few pieces he knew: these included ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, and ‘Begin the Beguine’. Farrier felt the impulse to tell him to stop, he needn’t feel as if he had got to earn his keep, but after his rendition of the Skye Boat Song, which he sung in a music-hall sort of Highlander voice, Farrier understood that that wasn’t what drove Collins at all. It was simply his endless desire to be looked at, listened to, thought of and laughed at. He couldn’t help it: it was how he proved to himself that he was all right.

Half-cut and exhausted (he had slept very little the night before), Farrier made his excuses and told them he was going upstairs.

‘That’s frightfully rude of you, you know, Lewis,’ said Mrs Farrier, who was reclining, martini still in hand, on a threadbare chaise longue. Unconcernedly, she set her glass on the floor and lighted a cigarette.

‘There are times I’ve been ruder to Archie,’ said Farrier.

‘Then do what you like,’ she said—and, turning to Collins: ‘Is my son very awful to you?’

‘Oh aye,’ said Collins, ‘but it’s how he’s always been.’ He smiled crookedly in Farrier’s direction, and Farrier remembered that, earlier that day, he had told himself he had chosen Collins. This man, untidy and drunk, and somewhere between thoughtfully and thoughtlessly cruel; the sort of man who played ‘Begin the Beguine’ on the piano, and sang along.

How late they stayed up after he retired, what they talked about when they were alone together, Farrier didn’t know. He stripped down to his vest and pants and threw himself into bed, blessed for the moment by the sedative qualities of drink. He thought: Collins can find me if he likes. He knows where I am.

 

* * *

 

Farrier woke three hours later, alone and almost sober. His mouth was foul-tasting and he had a terrible need to piss. He felt his way through the dark to the lavatory at the end of the corridor, cleaned his teeth and relieved himself, and tried to fall asleep again: but his luck had run out, his body rejected him, he was just as awake whether he had his eyes open or closed.

He had spent so many miserable hours awake in this bed, in this room, surrounded by the detritus of his youth: the ribbons he had won in games at school, the piles of boy’s magazines, the Greek dramas he had pretended to understand at Cambridge. The photographs of mates he had long since lost touch with, the letters sent in response to ones he didn’t remember writing. Despite this profusion of objects that were demonstrably his own he felt, lying there in the dark, as if he were in the cooler at Colditz again. He felt as if he should be thinking of plans for another escape attempt. You’re home, he told himself, but it was unconvincing: there were many times, in the stalags, that he woke and thought for a moment he was in his bedroom in the house in Norfolk.

He opened the window. The pigeons were roosting, the frogs croaking. Cool, dry autumn air blew the curtains in. Far off, past the place where lawn became parkland, a fox screamed. It sounded human; Farrier shut the window. Stepping carefully, avoiding the spots where the hardwood creaked, Farrier made his way to the room where Collins was.

Even in the corridor there was the thick scent of tobacco; Farrier eased open the door to see Collins sitting at the writing-desk, lamp lighted, smoking a cigarette. He did not look as if he had slept; his head moved slowly when he turned it to look at Farrier.

‘I had hoped you’d be sleeping,’ said Collins quietly.

‘You too,’ said Farrier.

Presently Farrier was in bed with Collins, asking him, ‘Which way will you have me, tonight?’

‘Oh, you’re giving me a choice, you randy desperate bastard?’ Collins snorted. ‘Why don’t you fuck me?’

‘You can’t call me a bastard in my own home,’ said Farrier.

Collins said, ‘You can fuck me in your own home.’

Farrier fucked Collins slowly at first, almost silently, heaving forward inch by inch until Collins’ knees, slung over Farrier’s shoulders, were up around his ears. It had been an age since they had done it this way, rather than the other way round; Farrier worried that Collins might decide he didn’t like being fucked after all. But Collins groaned with each of Farrier’s thrusts, growing louder and louder, until Farrier had to put his hand over Collins’ mouth. Collins licked Farrier’s palm, then took advantage of his momentary confusion to roll him over, straddle his hips and reach behind himself to guide Farrier’s cock into his arse again. This was a more difficult position for Collins, and by the moonlight Farrier saw him bite his lip, shut his eyes. He was frowning in the same way he did when he climbed out of his kite after he’d bitched up a sortie. Not for the first time Farrier wondered what Collins’ face looked like when he was in the cockpit, in the sky. He wondered, too, what his face would look like now, if he turned on the lamp: probably he was blushing, dark red in his cheeks and nose and neck, pale everywhere else except his cock.

Collins was straining with the effort of fucking himself, pulling wildly at his cock, muttering, ‘Ooh, Christ, fuck, oh, I’m going—’ But Farrier came before he did, entirely helpless to stop it; Collins had set a furious pace and the pleasure took him unawares, almost like a sudden stabbing pain. ‘I’m going—’ Collins was saying, and then, realising what was happening, ‘Oh no—o, now I’ve got to—’ And then there was him gone, and he seemed, despite the inconvenience of having to clean himself afterwards, to quite enjoy himself.

While Collins was in the lav, Farrier pulled his pyjamas on and went back to his own bedroom. There was no use in hanging about, he thought; he would only want to stay longer.

 

* * *

 

The Wash was the bay that lay between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, cutting into the coastline and trickling down through Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, as if it were reaching out towards, and failing to meet, the southern coast. Collins and Farrier rode for two hours through parkland and farmland—passing Sandringham, at which Collins thumbed his nose—till they were in view of the Hunstanton cliffs, which were a rich dark red topped by a line of bright white limestone chalk. They hitched their horses in town and walked down to the beach, where mossy boulders stretched out towards the water.

It was low tide; the waves were far-off and mild. Collins, in a pair of Farrier’s old riding boots, hopped between boulders, stopping now and then to pick up a red rock and fling it as far as he could towards the water.

‘Did you come here when you were a lad?’ asked Collins, peering over his shoulder at Farrier.

‘When I was a boy, yes,’ said Farrier. ‘By the time I was twelve or thirteen I’d better things to do during holidays than go to the seaside.’

‘Like what?’ Collins pitched another rock into the distance.

‘I don’t remember really,’ said Farrier. ‘Cricket or tennis or something, I suppose. And when I was old enough to travel alone I left England whenever I’d a chance. I spent a decent amount of time in Germany, actually, before things were very bad there. I think if I could do it again I’d choose somewhere other than the place I’d spend five years in prison.’

‘Still, you saw it before—all that. I wish I could’ve done. My da took us to Paris, once, when I was about fifteen. All we did was look at churches and old pictures, I kept imagining running off and finding a bar—somewhere, I don’t know—’

‘Somewhere that would have taught you about yourself?’

‘Something like that,’ said Collins. ‘As it was my first experience of sex was rubbing off Reggie Cunningham in a field on Hogmanay.’

‘Doesn’t sound awful,’ said Farrier, squinting.

‘Oh no,’ said Collins, ‘wonderful forty-five seconds. A hell of a hangover the next morning, though.’

‘How old were you?’

Though they had been walking slowly, they had reached the place where sand gave way to water. The water was flowing, rippling through river-like crevices in the sand, but Farrier couldn’t tell whether the tide was still going out or coming back in again.

‘Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. While I was still in school at least. Can’t even remember what year it was turning. I do remember, I thought I had a bloody good sense of what sort of a man I was going to be.’

‘I had someone when I was that age, too,’ said Farrier. He watched the sunlight break, and break again, in the moving water. ‘Stable-hand, a couple of years older than I was. Dark-haired, with moles on his face—the charming sort of mole, I mean. Irregular, but not at all ugly. I let him fuck me for half a year; then Robert found us kissing in the stables. We were so brazen, really, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Anyway he was sent away, without references. I had his sister’s address, but I didn’t write until after the war, and she wrote back saying Eddie had been taken prisoner in Singapore, and died building the Burma Railway, beaten to death by a guard. I suppose I was in Spangenberg, playing bridge and eating chocolate from a Red Cross parcel. Funny how it all turns out.’

Directly after having taken Collins into his confidence Farrier felt ridiculous. He was pitying himself, and worse, he was asking for pity. One could say nothing about the whole affair, the whole war, except that it had happened. He could not tell the truth about Eddie or Robert because he did not know it; neither could he tell the truth about himself. He understood then why Collins told war stories the way he did: it was because all of the war was a story, now, not even a memory of something real but a memory of something he had told someone, once. It did not bear thinking about.

‘Ah, it is funny, sometimes,’ said Collins. He looked down at his feet; Farrier looked, too, and saw that Collins was standing in an inch of water. When he stepped back, the imprint of the soles of his boots faded as the water washed through the sand. ‘D’you think the tide’s coming in?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Farrier, ‘I’ve never been able to tell.’

There were still vast stretches of beach exposed; when the tide was at its highest, the waves crashed against the sea wall. They turned back anyway, agreeing that the horses would be restless. Trudging towards town, his back to the bay, Collins whistled: ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea…’

 

* * *

 

‘How was Lavender?’ asked Mrs Farrier. She sat on a sofa in the sitting room, flipping slowly through the new issue of Country Life. ‘She didn’t give Squadron Leader Collins any trouble?’

Farrier had not expected her to be here. Ordinarily, at this hour, she was down in the kitchen, consulting with the cook about dinner. He had come in to pour himself a nip of whisky (the winds had been strong on the ride back), but wished now he had gone to the smoking room, or even his bedroom, where, in his desk drawers, he kept a small store of spirits. Collins was upstairs, bathing; under the pretext of showing him how to draw his bath, Farrier went into the bathroom along with him, and they brought each other off, still stinking of low tide and horses. The feeling of Collins’ skin still clung to him. Sipping his whisky, he wondered if he looked guilty.

‘She was fine,’ said Farrier. ‘Archie isn’t a bad rider. They got on well enough.’

‘Oh good,’ she said, ‘very good. I’d have looked horrifically cruel, telling him to take her, if she had thrown him. Oh I am glad.’ She had not lifted her eyes from her magazine.

Sensing that Farrier was not going to say anything, she started up again. ‘That man… You did get to know some odd fellows, didn’t you, in the Air Force? It’s not like the army at all.’

‘But you like him,’ said Farrier.

‘He’s awfully amusing. The things he says—I had always wanted to know how airmen talk when they’re amongst themselves. I suppose now I know.’

You don’t know, thought Farrier, and said instead, ‘Well he’s leaving tomorrow morning.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘you told me when you said he was coming.’

There was a silence so long that, in it, Farrier finished his whiskey, set the glass down, and went towards the door. Before he had reached it, Mrs Farrier said, ‘Pour me a brandy, won’t you? A nice helping.’

Farrier did. Once she had had several sips, she said, carefully, ‘I had thought, when you two were born, that life would be wonderfully easy for you. Perhaps you would be a little spoilt, but what did that matter? Once I knew the first war was going to be a long one, I thought, well thank heavens they’re too young. I thought you might have been—MPs, or ministers of something or other, or if you were in the Army, you would go to India or Singapore, somewhere decent, somewhere where there were decent Englishmen. Then there was the second war, and you were already in the Air Force, and Robert joined the Army, and I thought, well, why have I bothered, all this time? For Robert’s posthumous MC? Of course I know I’m lucky really; only half my children are dead. But all the same one wonders—well, I don’t know. Why the devil didn’t I simply refuse to marry?’

‘I haven’t always—’ The proper word did not come to Farrier, which he supposed was because it was stupid of him to try to talk at all. ‘Suffered,’ he settled on.

‘No, of course you haven’t,’ she said, as if the notion that he had suffered at all was unthinkable. It was not as if she was holding her own suffering against his own; she seemed to speak as if there had never been any suffering, ever, as if the very idea was something someone had thought up, once, and hadn’t had the good sense to discard. Farrier was grateful for it.

The room began to echo with the creaks and thumps of someone descending the staircase.

‘Such a noisy house,’ said Mrs Farrier. She licked her thumb so that she could turn the page more easily. ‘One hears everything.’

 

* * *

 

It was raining the morning Collins left, a thin cold rain with drops so fine it seemed to be mist. The pigeons went on cooing and flapping under eaves or on the branches of trees whose foliage was still thick. There was frost covering the windshield of the coupe, jamming the door handles, and Farrier had got to pour warm water over it to melt it. The Vauxhall and the Daimler were in the garage, perfectly warm already, but Collins asked for the coupe, and Farrier felt more like indulging him than denying him, then.

Collins was sprightly, energetic, in a way that he had rarely been after the war. Farrier guessed he was happy to get back to Duxford, where he lived in a room about half the size of Farrier’s bedroom, populated only by cheap institutional furniture. He was close enough to the runways, he had said in a letter, that he could hear the engines warming up as the kites were prepared for takeoff. Still, he had written, he could not help wondering what it was like at Butterworth.

The night before, Collins had come to Farrier, who was woken by the noise of Collins’ footsteps just outside his door. They were as drunk as they had been the first night, and they failed embarrassingly to stifle their laughter. Farrier thought for a second of his mother sitting up in bed, lamp on, reading Country Life; he must have made a face, because Collins asked him what was the matter.

‘Nothing,’ said Farrier.

‘You aren’t—?’ By the intensity of Collins’ hesitation Farrier imagined he was trying to say ‘upset’, ‘bothered’, ‘worried about something’. Farrier wasn’t. He whispered, ‘You’re very loud,’ and tweaked the tip of Collins’ nose.

They went under the duvet together, kissing each other’s necks and shoulders, grasping at each other’s clothing. Collins slipped his hand under the waistband of Farrier’s pinstriped cotton pyjama trousers, cupping his arse, then sliding his palm round to feel out Farrier’s half-hard cock. Farrier pulled Collins’ vest up and rubbed broad circles into his chest, feeling the soft hair there flatten under his hand and then spring up again. How many of these sensations, he wondered, had he felt, and stored in his memory, before he was captured? Would he have understood what he had lost if Collins had died? There were things missing now, he supposed, that he would never know or guess, and he didn’t feel those.

Though neither of them had intended it, they fell asleep without having fucked. Farrier woke in darkness, not knowing which way was up. Collins was sprawled beside him, not quite touching him, taking up much more of the bed than was his right and snoring like a drunk. Farrier elbowed him onto his side of the bed, whereupon he woke, cursing.

‘You’ve only got an hour,’ said Farrier, ‘then you’ll have to go back and lie on your bed and wrinkle the linen.’

‘Then give me my fucking hour,’ muttered Collins, and flung his legs out into Farrier’s side of the bed, beginning almost immediately to snore again. Farrier picked up Collins’ hand and kissed the back of it; Collins twitched and, still asleep, said something about clover.

The train was already at the station when they arrived. As Farrier brought the car to a stop, Collins looked about, then surged forward, nearly knocking Farrier back, to kiss him on the cheek. During the war, before Dunkirk, they rushed their goodbyes because to prolong them was to bring bad luck. It was force of habit now: a pleasant ritual, one they were confident would be repeated.

‘Don’t—’ began Farrier.

‘I know!’ called Collins, clutching his hat to his head, flying towards the train. The whistle was blowing; Farrier reversed, unreversed, drove off. It was another superstition of theirs that it was bad luck to watch a lover out of sight; and besides, he was going back to the house to pack his things for London, he was taking the next train out.

 

* * *

 

 


End file.
